


spare me my one good boy

by apocryphal



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 303 Spoilers, Angst, Depression, F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-25
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-16 02:40:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocryphal/pseuds/apocryphal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek thinks that it’s probably social protocol to invite her in, but sadly, he has a feral sister, bloodstains, a table full of magic supplies, and a giant hole in one wall. Plus he killed someone on the couch last week, so now there’s nowhere to sit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	spare me my one good boy

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd lightning-quick by [verity](http://archiveofourown.org/users/verity), who is amazing as ever. Title taken from Lucille Clifton's absolutely gorgeous poem [sarah's promise](http://ifyouhadbeenhere.blogspot.com/2011/03/sarahs-promise-lucille-clifton.html), which you should all read because it inspired/relates to this fic and is also just amazing. Also referenced/quoted are Jonathan Swift's [The Lady's Dressing Room](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180934</a), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's _The Great Gatsby_. 
> 
>  
> 
> **Warnings:** Brief scene with depression and suicidal thoughts, in the vein of 303's ending. Skip the first scene and you're good.

Derek drives the teacher home in her car. It’s old, smells funny, and there are small, hard cigarette burns melted into the fuzzy interior. It reminds him a lot of his older brother’s first car, bought with five year’s worth of savings and lovingly named Desdemona.

“Oh God,” the woman says, for probably the fifth time since they left the school.

Her heart is pounding, and Derek can smell salt in the air from her sweat. He can feel the chill of her body. Shock, he thinks.

"Oh, God,” she says again, breathing in after each word, but then she breathes in too deeply and loses her rhythm. “Oh God, oh God, I’m alive. I—”

She sucks in a huge breath of air.

“Left or right?” Derek asks, rolling to a stop at the intersection of her street.

“Left,” the teacher says. “Oh God. I’m alive.”

_Yes_ , Derek thinks bleakly, because he’s also alive, and turns left when the light goes green.

It had all happened so fast. He’d sunk against the wall, the impact of Cora and the kid at the pool and _Erica_ rushing over him now that he’d finally gotten a moment to breathe. Then Scott had heard the third heartbeat and Derek was forcing himself back into action mode. It had made sense. He’d go down into the boiler room, and he’d die, or he wouldn’t.

The clawing had hurt, at first.

But then it hadn’t, so much.

Now it mostly itches, in the way that healing does. He feels heavy, and tired, and every breath is a heaving push against the weight of it all. He wants it to stop itching, because it makes him want to scratch, and shake, and tear, and rend, and rip his body to pieces and scream until the bands across his lungs burst

“Oh, God,” says the teacher again. Her tiny, frail body is trembling, fingers gripping her knees.

He finds the house number that she gave him before they left the school and pulls into the driveway. The house is incredibly small by Beacon Hills’ standards, but for some reason it fits her. She probably lives alone.

The teacher still breathing fast and hard as he walks her to her door. She fumbles her keys in the lock, so Derek does it for her, but he doesn’t follow her in.

“Lock your doors and windows,” he tells her.

She stares at him, wide-eyed.

“You’re alive,” Derek says. “You didn’t die. You could have, but you didn’t.”

She nods, heart beating rabbit-fast. Her lips tremble.

“Lock the doors and windows,” he repeats.

He walks back to his loft in the light of the morning sun. It feels strange, because he’d thought after a realization like _I’m not dead and I regret that_ , he’d be eyeing every bridge or passing car with new fascination. But he’s not.

He’s got things to do.

 

Derek doesn’t think about the boiler room again until it’s five days later and he’s at the high school for another after-school meeting with the Breakfast Club, and he sees her in the hallway.

They both freeze.

She’s the first to move, after a long pause, with the slow relaxing of her shoulders and a tentative smile poking up the corners of her mouth.

Derek stares back, every muscle tense and ready to spring.

“I, um,” she says, and then laughs a little like she’s embarrassed. “It’s you.”

Derek nods.

"I didn’t—I’m sorry, about the other night. I didn’t even thank you,” she says. “For saving me, and driving me home afterward.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Derek tells her, automatically.

“You saved my _life_ ,” she says meaningfully.

Derek shrugs.

She frowns at him.

“I have to go,” he says.

“Okay?” she replies, her frown deepening.

“You’re welcome,” Derek tries.

“You’re… very strange,” she tells him, but now she looks amused. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“Uh. Derek,” he says. “Hale.”

She smiles. “I’m Jennifer. Blake. But you can just call me Jenn.”

Derek stares.

“You said earlier that you had to… go?” she says tentatively.

“Yes,” Derek says, and leaves.

 

She makes him eggplant parmesan.

Derek only opens the door as much as necessary, and does his best to use his body to keep Jenn from seeing his still-feral sister in manacles in the corner. And the bloodstains. And the pile of magic supplies Stiles had helpfully strewn all over the table. And the gaping hole in the wall.

“How did you find me?” he demands.

“Um,” she says, fingers wrapping around the casserole dish. “You were… in the phone book?”

He’s in the phone book?

“We’re in the phone book?” Isaac says incredulously, from somewhere upstairs.

“I just thought I’d, um, say thank you for saving my life, again,” Jenn says, holding out the casserole dish. “It’s eggplant parmesan. Do you… like eggplant parmesan? Oh no. You don’t like eggplant parmesan.”

“No, I—I do,” says Derek quickly, taking it from her. “I was just surprised. Sorry.”

“No problem,” she says.

Derek thinks that it’s probably social protocol to invite her in, but sadly, he has a feral sister, bloodstains, a table full of magic supplies, and a giant hole in one wall. Plus he killed someone on the couch last week, so now there’s nowhere to sit.

“Well,” Jenn says, squaring her shoulders. “Thank you, again, for saving my life. I hope you like the food. Um. My number’s taped to the bottom—that’s kind of my only casserole dish, so if you could return it, that would be appreciated.”

“Yeah,” Derek says. “I mean, thank you. This smells great.”

Evidently Cora thinks so, too, because she lets out a snarl and charges the door, chains snapping.

Jenn’s eyes widen. “What was—”

“Nothing,” Derek says quickly, and slams the door in her face.

 

The eggplant parmesan is delicious. Even Cora, who has been steadfastly refusing Derek’s previous offers of takeout Thai and pizza, readily shoves her face into the plate Derek fixes for her.

"So,” says Isaac, when they have successfully demolished the entire casserole in less than forty-five minutes. “You and Ms. Blake?”

“Shut up,” says Derek.

 

He waits until well after Isaac has left for school the following morning to venture over to her house. He’s taped a note to the dish with a very inadequate _sorry for slamming the door_ scrawled onto it. Part of him feels bad about it, but most of him feels like it’s probably for the best, anyway.

He’s not expecting Jenn to be at her house, on her hands and knees in the middle of a scraggly garden.

“Derek!” she says, smiling at him sunnily.

It’s Monday. She should be at school. Why isn’t she at school?

“I was just bringing this back,” he says, holding out the casserole dish and remembering too late the note on it. “It was really good. Thank you.”

"You can just set it by the door. I don’t want to get it all dirty,” Jenn says, holding up her filthy hands. Then she pauses. “Did you _walk_ here?”

Derek shrugs. “I had time to kill.”

“Well, I guess that’s one way to spend your Labor Day, I guess,” Jenn says with a grin.

Right. Labor Day.

Which begs the question of where Isaac went this morning if it wasn’t to school, but Derek can worry about that later.

“Hey, if you don’t have any plans, do you want to give me a hand with the garden?” Jenn asks, as Derek sets down the casserole dish. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but this was kind of a learning experience garden. Next year’s is going to be better.”

His father had gardened. Derek spent half his childhood being dragged around the local Home Depot.

Derek tears the note he’d written off of the casserole dish and says, “Sure.”

 

When Jenn invites him to come inside to cool off, Derek more or less figures that she’s going to pounce on him. She doesn’t stink of arousal, but Derek knows how he looks and he knows that sweating in a garden for an hour doesn’t help matters. He doesn’t really mind. He supposes he sort of owes her for locking her in a boiler room with his crazed Beta and sister.

But she doesn’t pounce. She pours him a glass of ice water and gets flustered when he catches sight of a rack of decorative spoons on the wall of her kitchen.

“Oh, that’s just—it’s just something I collect. It’s stupid, I know,” she says, going pink.

Derek agrees. He’s always thought collections were stupid. What’s the point of spending so much money on something that just sits around and gathers dust? Especially tiny spoons. What do you do with a rack of tiny spoons?

But he doesn’t want to say that, so instead he casts his eyes around for something else in the room.

“You, uh, teach English?” he asks, gesturing to the classic literature lining the top shelf of her bookcase.

"Yes!” she says, looking relieved. “I teach English Literature—AP and regular. We’re doing _Heart of Darkness_ right now, which, I don’t know if you ever had to read it in high school or college, but it’s not exactly a fun read.”

Derek blinks. He thinks this is the first time in nine months _anyone_ has assumed that he went to college.

Which, he did. He has his degree and everything.

“I actually—literature is what they’re having me teach, but my concentration was really in poetry,” Jenn says, her eyes going to the shelf below the one full of literature.

They sit at the kitchen table, drinking ice water, and Derek listens to her natter on about her senior honors thesis, her poetic awakening during her sophomore year, and how she wants to eventually convince Beacon Hills High to let her design and teach a class all about poetry. Derek listens, and does his best to recall anything he learned about poetry in his freshman English class, but all he can find is a memory of himself drunkenly shouting “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” over and over across the quad after he’d passed the final exam.

Derek leaves without being pounced on, and instead with a book of poetry by Lucille Clifton in his hand. He reads it aloud to Cora back at the loft, who snarls and snaps at him for the first few poems but eventually settles down and almost seems to listen.

 

They probably aren’t dating. Derek never lets her come over to his place, and mostly they just sit around and talk about—God, they talk about things like car insurance, and the stock market, and how they used to think thirty was ancient but now actually it seems quite young. They don’t kiss. And for the first time in months, Derek has a kitchen to cook in, and someone else who loves cooking just as much as he does to keep up with him.

All of these things, Derek likes, but he really likes it best when Jenn complains about teenagers being the bane of her existence. Because even if she doesn’t know about Derek’s own merry band of teenage idiots, it feels damn good to hear someone else confirm that, yes, teenagers are the _worst_.

They go out to dinner, far away from Beacon Hills, and halfway through Derek sets down his silverware and says, “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

"Yeah,” Jenn agrees, cracking open a crab leg. “I keep waiting for that magical moment when I’ll suddenly know how to be an adult and do, you know, all of these adult things. But. That hasn’t happened yet. I mean, you’ve seen my garden.”

Which isn’t exactly what Derek had meant, but he nods and picks up his fork and knife again to go back to eating.

 

Jenn doesn’t die, and she isn’t secretly evil, which is more than Derek can say about anyone else he’s ever loved in his life.

He decides, two months in, to bring up the night they met. He wants to _tell her_.

“Listen,” he says, when they’re curled up in their respective corners of her sofa, with their respective glasses of wine and their books. “That night in the boiler room. When I saved you. You never asked, and I never told you—”

“Derek, no,” Jenn interrupts, lowering her book.

Derek stops.

“Just—I don’t want to know,” she says. “I’m not an idiot, I know that something happened that night. I know that there are dark and ugly parts of yourself that you don’t tell me about, and… I just don’t want to know. Okay?”

“But—”

“ _No_ ,” she says.

“It’s part of who I am,” Derek says, confused and maybe even hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Jenn tells him.

He sits there in silence for a long time, unable to keep reading but not wanting to leave.

“Derek,” Jenn says eventually, setting down her book and taking his hand in hers.

Derek flashes back to that night in the boiler room, reaching for her hand, feeling her delicate hand slide into his own and pulling her up off the ground. They haven’t held hands since that night, but even so, her hand now feels secure and strong and _right_ where it hadn’t before. It feels like Cora’s had, years ago, when he’d been fifteen and angry and she’d been eight and giggly.

“You’re a good man, and you make me happy,” Jenn says, squeezing his hand gently. “Let’s just try to enjoy this while it lasts.”

“I’m not a good man,” Derek says.

“You are to me,” Jenn replies. “What’s wrong with me wanting to keep it that way?”

 

“So, _The Great Gatsby_ ,” Isaac says one night. “I’m supposed to write an essay about one of the major themes.”

Derek is taking the manacles down from the wall, since Cora no longer needs them. Probably.

"Okay?” he says, waiting for the punch line.

Isaac stares at him like he’s an idiot. “Help me out with this. It’s like the most irritating book to ever exist, and you’re dating my English teacher, dude.”

“We’re not dating,” Derek says. “We’re just friends.”

“Yeah. Right. _Okay_.”

Teenagers are truly the worst.

“If you’re having trouble with the essay, you should talk to her,” Derek tells him, pulling a fastening out of the wall. “Ask her to meet during lunch, or your free period.”

“Or you could just talk to her for me,” Isaac shoots back.

“She doesn’t know about you,” Derek says. “Any of you. And of— _this_.”

He waves a hand around the loft demonstratively, and then goes to unscrew the next fastening.

“Oh,” says Isaac. “So you’re just—”

“Just. Friends,” Derek says.

Isaac sighs. “God, you’re useless.”

“Completely,” Derek agrees, rolling his eyes, and Isaac stomps off to his room in a huff.

 

He and Jenn watch the new _Great Gatsby_ movie that night, because she’s planning to show it to the class after they hand in their essays on Monday. Derek hadn’t liked the book in high school, hadn’t liked _Moulin Rouge_ , and will always hate Toby Maguire for being in awful Spiderman movies, so instead he hides out in the kitchen, experimenting with chocolate-covered baked pears.

About halfway through, Jenn pauses the movie and wanders in, notebook in hand.

“Needed a break?” Derek asks.

"It’s awful,” Jenn answers, setting the notebook down and picking up a cooling pear slice. “I’m not even a _Great Gatsby_ purist; I hate the book.”

“I didn’t know English teachers were allowed to hate classic literature,” Derek teases.

“It’s easy to teach—the kids love it because it’s raunchy, and there’s symbolism everywhere, but—it’s just so _despicable_ , and there's no emotional—” Jenn takes a bite of the pear. “Oh my God, these are so good.”

“You could just not show the movie, if it’s that bad,” Derek suggests.

“They would riot,” Jenn says seriously.

Derek pictures their outraged faces with no small amount of glee.

“Do it,” he says.

“Hush, you. You’re a terrible influence,” Jenn says, swatting at him. “Bring the pears into the living room and sit with me through the rest of the movie. I can’t do the rest of it alone; I need someone to complain to.”

Derek groans, but pulls down a plate and start piling the pears onto it. 


End file.
